Daivergent connects people on the autism spectrum with jobs in data management

Great startups normally come from a personal place. Byran Dai’s new company, Daivergent, is no different.

Founded in December 2017, Daivergent looks to connect enterprise clients with folks on the autism spectrum who will help complete tasks in AI/ML data management.

Dai’s younger brother, Brandon, is on the autism spectrum. Dai realized that his brother and other folks on the spectrum are perfect candidates for certain high-complexity tasks that require extraordinary attention to detail, such as data entry and enrichment, quality assurance and data validation, and content moderation.

In a landscape where just about everyone is working on AI and machine learning algorithms, organizing data is a top priority. Daivergent believes that it can put together the perfect pool of data specialists to complete any task in this space.

Daivergent partners with various agencies including the AHRC and Autism Speaks to source talent. Those folks go through a screening process, which assesses their abilities to complete these sorts of tasks. They then become Daivergent contractors, where they get further training and then start working on projects.

The company says that there are 2.5 million adults with autism in the U.S., and Autism Speaks reports an 85 percent unemployment rate among college-educated adults with autism.

Daivergent not only provides a way for these people to get into the workforce, but it offers a way for corporations and companies to employ American workers for projects they would likely otherwise employ overseas contractors.

When a new task comes in to Daivergent, the company splits that project into smaller tasks and then assigns those tasks to its workers. The company also determines the complexity of the overall project, factoring in the urgency level of the request, to decide pricing.

Daivergent takes a small cut of the earnings and passes the rest on to the workers.

Right now, Daivergent has 25 active workers performing tasks for customers, with 150 workers registered and going through the qualification process and another 400 adults with autism in the candidate pool.